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PFOT: Reflections on God’s Wrath

Just been thinking some more about my struggles with the emphasis on God’s wrath that are so obvious in the foreword to PFOT as well as in much of the PFOT text and blog posts on Penal Substitution.

In "The Nonviolent Atonement" J Denny Weaver writes (p78) of the Wrath and God and the Love of God as two stances from which we view the salvation drama.

Thinking more on this. I just wonder to what extent the Wrath of God is actually the absence of God caused by human rejection. If God is all I hope he is, if he offers life both in all it’s fullness and in it’s eternity then would I not perceive his absence as his wrath. When he is absent there is no hope, no future, no love. Yet his absence is not caused by anger but by love, his love that lets me choose evil.

This understanding of God’s wrath as his absence seems to me to fit all the passages I have checked it against so far.

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One thought on “PFOT: Reflections on God’s Wrath”

I see what you’re getting at. I think that the problem I have, personally, is that “wrath” seems to me to something that is active; you’re making it passive.
I prefer to redefine God’s justice as restorative. So I’d see things as “God is so angry at the way sin messes up his creation that he risks everything to help its victims.” As opposed to PSA’s (as far I understand it) “God is so angry at sinners that he takes active steps to destroy them.”